The Greenstone Grail (41 page)

‘Why did you come to me?’ Halmé asked.

‘I found myself here. I don’t choose – I can’t control it. I go – wherever I end up. I don’t think it’s random, but I don’t know how it happens. I wanted to get here, and I found the place in my mind where I go when I dream – the way through. But I’ve no idea why I came out in your rooms. Honestly.’ He added: ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt your bath.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I’d finished. Anyway, I’m glad. I’m glad you came here. If there is a pattern, then it was
meant
. My brother believes in patterns. He says all worlds are interwoven, part of a Great Pattern, and if you have the power you can change it, bend it around you.’

‘Your brother … the Grandir?’

‘Of course – you saw him too. He will want to meet you …’ She stopped. The light dimmed in her eyes.

‘I came to you,’ Nathan said.

‘He would be angry, if he knew I had hidden something like this from him. Something like you.’

‘Does he – does he get violent, when he’s angry?’

‘No.’ She looked faintly surprised at the suggestion. ‘He’s never violent. He wouldn’t harm me in any way. But his anger is – terrible. I feel it inside me, clouding me, darkening everything … He sets me at a distance, isolates me. I can’t bear that. I need him to love me.’ There was something oddly childish in that plea, even to Nathan’s ear. He decided it would be a mistake to tell her that the Grandir already knew of him, spied on him, through a star that wasn’t a star. He didn’t know if the Grandir was a good man, but he was ruthless, and powerful – too powerful for Nathan – and to ask his help would mean him taking over. Nathan knew this was a task for
him
. Besides, the Grandir had an unknown purpose, a Plan – perhaps he was bending the Great Pattern of all the worlds around himself even now. Nathan, though he was only the tiniest particle in that Pattern, had no intention of being bent.

‘You don’t have to tell him about me,’ he suggested tentatively, ‘if you don’t want to.’

‘He’d find out,’ Halmé said. ‘He reads minds.’

‘Not yours,’ Nathan said, suddenly positive, remembering how the Grandir had refrained from touching her at the gnomons’ cage, though he told her to draw back. ‘Not if he wasn’t suspicious. He wouldn’t intrude. You know he wouldn’t.’

‘Ye-es,’ she said slowly. ‘That is true. But …’

‘I need your help. Please. There’s something I have to do
here, and you can help me – only you. I know that’s why I found myself here. Like you said, it was
meant
.’

She sat down on the curve of the sofa, and motioned to him to sit beside her. She looked almost resolute, almost hesitant, like someone trying against their nature to be brave. ‘Tell me everything,’ she said.

He didn’t, of course. But he told her about the Sangreal being in his world, and how it was there for safekeeping, because neo-salvationists and suchlike might steal it if it was here, and do the Great Spell, and get it wrong. (‘A Great Spell,’ she said. ‘Oh yes. A Great Spell to change the Great Pattern. I know.’) He explained how a thief in his world had taken it, and sent it back, and his friend was wrongly arrested by the authorities, and he had to restore the Grail to save her, as well as for the sake of the Grail itself. He kept it simple, and hoped it was true. He
felt
it was true, with some deep unexplained vein of instinct. Kwanji Ley was a good person, he was sure, but perhaps she had been misguided, or the organization had used her. Anyway, he didn’t believe the spell could be botched together, or performed by people who didn’t know what it really was. That would be like some madman trying to build an atom bomb in his own garage. He held on to that thought, and watched Halmé’s face, which managed somehow to be expressive and at the same time unreadable, maybe because he didn’t know what it was supposed to express. Possibly it was an effect of that exquisite disproportion, the alien quality of her features. He was dimly aware that she was struggling to overcome some flaw in her own nature, weakness or inertia, fighting to become someone she had never been.

At last she said: ‘I
can
help you, I know I can. I
will
. But it is a big task for a small person. Do children in your world usually perform such tasks?’

Nathan thought of all the books he had ever read, of the Pevensies, Colin and Susan, Harry Potter, Lyra Belacqua and a hundred others. ‘All the time,’ he said.

Annie spent an uneasy, restless evening. Thoughts of Michael and the kiss frequently intruded, usually at the most inappropriate moments, leaving her confused and vaguely guilty because she had more important things to worry about. She telephoned Bartlemy, who was kind and unruffled and calmed her fears a little. ‘The evidence against the children is purely circumstantial, and without a confession or further proof it would be difficult for the police to proceed. Besides, the eyewitness statements refer categorically to a dwarf, and both children are too tall. If the cup can be returned, I think they’d drop the case. Trust Nathan. He has courage and determination – and he’s very intelligent, which always helps. Where is he?’

‘In bed,’ Annie said baldly.

‘I see.’

She looked in on him around eight, to find him sleeping on his side, fully clothed even to his shoes. She thought of taking them off, then remembered that whatever he was wearing he would wear in his dreams, and presumably he didn’t want to be prowling around the other world with bare feet. So she contented herself with putting a blanket over him, closing the curtains, and leaving him to wherever sleep would take him. She didn’t call the police, and they didn’t call her, but she was sure Pobjoy would be on the line in the morning. Around nine thirty, Lily Bagot phoned to tell her they had finally been allowed to return home. Hazel hadn’t been charged, and the lawyer seemed to be saying the same thing as Bartlemy, but rather more aggressively. However, Lily sounded strained to exhaustion, alternately tearful and furious, and Annie offered to go over there. Lily said no thanks,
it was lovely of her, but Hazel wanted a word. And then Hazel’s voice took over, asking nervously if Nathan was there.

‘He’s here,’ Annie said, ‘but he can’t come to the phone right now. He’s – he’s gone to get the Grail back.’

There was a short pause. ‘Gone where?’ Hazel demanded.

‘The other world. He’s … sleeping. Don’t be afraid. He won’t fail you.’

‘Good,’ Hazel said, and rang off.

Annie thought of calling Michael, but she didn’t know what to say and what to leave out, and suddenly she was very tired. She went to bed without disturbing Nathan, but for all her weariness sleep was a long time coming, and her thoughts turned to Rianna, for a little variety in her worries. She wondered where the real Rianna was, in Georgia or under some strange enchantment, and she slipped into a dream where Rianna lay on a bed in a ruined castle, locked in a sorcerous sleep for time uncounted, while roses grew over her couch, enclosing her in a cage of thorns.

Nathan was flying through the air on the back of his own xaurian, while the warm desert night poured over him. He was wearing protective clothing which Halmé had procured for him; a scanner in her chambers had read his measurements and the garments had appeared to order in the space of about an hour. They were seamless, made of some fabric that felt like metal but moved like silk, blue with a grey sheen or grey with a blue sheen. There was also a pair of goggles whose tint varied according to the light like Polaroid lenses. ‘You will need a guide,’ Halmé said. ‘Someone I can trust’ – and somehow he wasn’t surprised when the man she summoned was Raymor, though he knew of no previous connection between them. ‘He was my bodyguard,’ she explained, ‘when I was very young and my father thought I
had need of guarding. My father was rigid in his ideas, but Ray was kind. Sometimes we laughed together.’ She concluded: ‘He would die for me,’ not in wonder, nor vanity, but as a minor detail, a mere commonplace. Raymor remembered Nathan as the ghost who had sat behind him once before, and seemed in some awe of him. His mission, Halmé declared, was totally secret. ‘Since it is important the Grandir has authorized me to take charge,’ she said. Even though his face was hidden, Nathan could sense Raymor’s doubt. So did Halmé. ‘He trusts me as he trusts no other,’ she said, and Raymor appeared to relax a little.

Then they were soaring over the city, cutting up the slower skimmers, skirting the curving flanks of giant buildings, diving under arches and lifting over crested roofs. The teeming lights – from screened window and high door, from eyelamp and hanging globe – looped and dipped and streamed behind them, until at last the city fell away, and the remaining traffic swerved north or west, and they headed south-east into a night with no lights at all.

Despite his worries Nathan couldn’t help enjoying himself. He had felt insecure at first, straddling the reptile’s narrow back, knowing that his solidity was no longer borderline and if he came off there was nothing to hit but the ground. Also he had little confidence in his ability to steer the xaurian (he had once ridden a horse, which ignored everything he did with the reins). But the beast appeared content to follow its stablemate, the pommel of the saddle was high enough to hold on to, and he soon grew accustomed to the dipping and wheeling of the flight. Below he thought he could see the regular outlines of fields, and long tubular buildings like greenhouses, gleaming in the double moonrise (the third moon of Eos always lagged behind). He asked Raymor about them, using the communicator inside his hood. ‘We grow most
vegetables under the filter-screens,’ Raymor answered. ‘Very few crops are hardy enough now to survive the sun. The fields are mostly left to the weeds and spittlegrass. What planet are you from, where they still grow crops outside?’

‘You wouldn’t know it,’ Nathan said.

The signs of cultivation ceased, and there was only the desert, with the dunes rolling like great waves, pathless and shapeless, changeful as the sea. They flew for what seemed like hours, barely speaking. The night drew on and the moons followed their diverse paths across the sky. The third moon rose over the horizon, late and last, its face bisected with an arc of darkness. It was redder than the other two, blood-bright, and its light showed the landscape hardening into rock, weather-rounded ridges thrusting upwards through the ocean of sand. Ancient watercourses made deep creases in the slopes, snaring the shadows. Stars clustered thickly at the zenith of the sky, but their pale glimmer did not touch the earth: this belonged to the third moon alone. ‘It is called Astrond,’ said Raymor, ‘the Red Moon of Madness. Long ago, when pollution first began to change its colour, people said it was unlucky to be out under such a moon.’

‘Do you believe that?’ Nathan asked.

‘Superstition is not encouraged here.’

‘But you use magic,’ Nathan objected, thinking the two things went hand in hand.

‘We use power. Magic of the kind you mean, wild magic, out of control – that was over in the remote past. We harnessed it and tamed it.’

‘Then what is the contamination?’

Raymor didn’t answer for some time. The xaurian’s wings tilted, making a slight change of direction, and a single beat swept them southwards. ‘Men made that,’ he said eventually. ‘They misused the power, warping it to evil. I suppose you
could say that what followed was the magic fighting back. That would be one way of looking at it. We thought we could rule the universe, mould it in our own image. We might have succeeded if it hadn’t been for war, and the desire to kill.’

‘Must there always be war?’ Nathan said. ‘Surely, if you’re civilized enough, you can live without it.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Raymor. ‘That was a level of civilization we never attained.’

They flew on. A faint greyness above the eastern horizon showed a ragged line of mountains. Raymor had estimated they would reach the cave around dawn, and Nathan tried to convince himself the mountain range looked familiar. The recollection of the monster had taken over his thoughts, but he hoped it might be easier to pass it in the dark. ‘Are we nearly there?’

‘Maybe half an hour.’

‘How will we dodge the lizard thing? Will it be asleep?’

‘The Grokkul hears and feels even in its sleep.’ Raymor’s tone was even.

‘Will it see us, if we try to slip past?’ Nathan asked.

‘It sees heat. To the Grokkul, your body glows in the dark. Or in the light. I will distract it. You must go in the cave alone.’

‘That sounds awfully dangerous for you,’ Nathan said unhappily. He knew, even if Raymor didn’t, that the entrance would be too narrow for an adult male.

‘It’s more dangerous for you,’ Raymor responded. ‘The Grokkul’s main object is to guard the cave.’

There was silence for a while. Nathan struggled to feel brave, conscious that he was failing. Hazel in a police cell seemed impossibly far away, and the monster was very near. At last he said: ‘Thank you. I mean, thank you for helping me, for risking your life. Whatever happens. And good luck.’

‘May the luck be yours,’ said Raymor, and somehow Nathan
knew it was a traditional rejoinder, but it made him even more uncomfortable.

The light was growing now, reaching out across the sky, paling the desert to grey. Astrond, caught above the western horizon, still showed dimly red. And now far ahead Nathan thought he could discern the cliff-face which hid the cave, and the irregular slope with its double row of triangular boulders. His internal organs gave an unwelcome jolt; he wished they weren’t approaching so fast, but the light was faster. The sun inched above the mountains, washing the sandscape with colour and shadow. The slope was nearly under them now. Nathan tried to distinguish the outline of the monster, the broad flat head and splayed feet, but though there were humps which he guessed might be the eyes its camouflage was so perfect he could almost fool himself it wasn’t there. He could see no sign of the wild xaurians. Raymor called: ‘Hold back!’ and swooped low towards the rocks.